Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 8

the irrelevance of thinking

Mary Harrington:

As I argued here, it would would be more accurate (if less snappy) to describe AI as “powerful modelling and prediction tools based on pattern recognition across very large datasets”. It is, in other words, not a type of cognition in its own right, but – to borrow a term from Marshall McLuhan – one of the “extensions of man”: specifically a means of extending cognition itself.

I don’t think this is correct; what LLMs do is not the extension of cognition but rather the simulation and commodification of the palpable products of cognition.

The people who make LLMs have little discernible interest in cognition itself. Some of them may believe that they’re interested in cognition, but what they’re really focused on is product — that is, output, what gets spat out in words or images or sounds at the conclusion of an episode of thinking.

Seeing those products, they want to simulate them so that they can commodify them: package them and serve them up in exchange for money.

This doesn’t mean that LLMs are evil, or that it’s wrong to sell products for money; only that thinking itself is irrelevant to the whole business.

a taxonomy of writers: 2

A couple of years ago I wrote about kinds of thinkers: Explainers, Illuminators, and Provokers. That classification was based on effect, that is, what those thinkers do for me as a reader. But you can also classify thinkers by their purposes. Thus my second tripartite scheme, thinker-writers who are

DiagnosticPrescriptiveTherapeutic

Diagnostic writers are usually also Explainers, and what they’re trying to explain is What Is Wrong. What’s our affliction? Where did it come from? (Diagnosis is commonly etiological.) Our moment, it seems to me, is greatly overpopulated by diagnostic writing. As I’ve commented before, most of our diagnostic writers seem unaware that hundreds or thousands of writers before them have made precisely the arguments that they make. (That doesn’t stop readers from treating them as savants, though.)

We don’t have nearly as many Prescriptive writers, but those who exist tend to be really bad at it: obvious and abstract. (“We need to cultivate a society of mutual respect.”) I remember long ago seeing a cartoon: a clown is standing in front of a TV camera, while someone is holding up a cue card that says, “Make a funny joke.” That’s what our current prescriptive writers tend to do.

Therapeutic writers try to help us manage our misery. They may or may not have diagnoses of it, they may or may not have prescriptions for cure, but they know that while we’re in the midst of it we need entertainment, distraction, or consolation — ideally all three. I don’t think we have enough of this kind of thing either; and even when it’s good it’s not especially highly regarded.

We have so much diagnostic writing because it often tells us something we very much want to know: which of our enemies are to blame. That, I think, is why we can read it endlessly, even when it repeats what we’ve already read.

Francis

I am by no means glad that Francis is dead, but I must admit that I am relieved that his papacy is over — or would be, if I didn’t suspect that even worse is to come. 

Pope Francis was consistently and unreasonably generous towards those he deemed his theopolitical allies, regardless of their moral failings; consistently and unreasonably mean-spirited towards those he deemed his theopolitical enemies, regardless of their piety and devotion to the Church; and habitually prone to sowing confusion about what that Church teaches, as well as about its authority to teach it. 

However: Francis offered much wise and vital teaching in Laudato Sí — I wish that were more widely discussed in assessments of his legacy. (I wrote about it here.) 

There’s a good chance that his successor will be more impartial than Francis was — less Schmittian in his deployment of a Friend/Enemy scheme in dealing with people — and that he will be clearer in his articulation of what Catholicism teaches and why. 

I’m less confident, though, thanks to Francis’s work at reshaping the institution in his image, that the next Pope will be as independent of the Zeitgeist as he ought to be. Pio Nono got many individual judgments wrong, but when he (rather indignantly) denied that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself to and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” he was spot on. It is the task of Christ’s Church to preach and teach the Gospel and help the world to come to terms with it. I am of course not Roman Catholic, but any branch of the church that does that particular work earns my gratitude.

My fear is is that Francis has reshaped the imperatives of the Roman communion in ways that make it overly sensitive to the indignation of the bien-pensant and insufficiently sensitive to the unchanging message of the Christian Gospel. My hope is that my fear is unwarranted.  

Moses the roadgiver

As I was drafting my previous post about the changes that the middle of the 20th century brought about, I realized that it was long past time for me to read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. So now I have read it, and it is as great as everyone says — or almost everyone anyway. Some of those who have criticized the book write as though it merely denounces everything Robert Moses did, and so, while the book is indeed fierce in its exposure of Moses’s arrogance, cruelty, and short-sightedness, it’s not a hatchet job.

What Caro shows is a man whose desire to improve life for the residents of his native city was sincere and genuine — as was his belief that he knew better than anyone else in the world what improvements were needed and how they might be implemented. Over time, his compassion and desire to serve the public gradually withered as his arrogance metastasized. After many years in power, Moses lost the ability to distinguish between what he wanted to do and what needed to be done, and became completely unreflective about such questions – a thoughtlessness best manifested in his mantra-like recital of the cliché that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

As Caro points out, even if Moses had wanted to take time to reflect he could not have done so, simply because he had so many obligations, held so many positions, ran so many organizations. Of course, he only carried so many burdens because he sought the power that they made possible, so what you see in The Power Broker is the precise way in which a brilliant and at least initially compassionate man drives himself into a doom-loop of libido dominandi. But even as Caro describes the spiral of this doom-loop, he nevertheless always also shows the great benefits that accrued to many from Moses’s endeavors. He shows you both those who benefited from what Moses built and those whose lives were effectively destroyed by it, and allows you to draw your own conclusions about how much of what Moses did was justified, and how much we would keep if we could.

For instance: Moses built a series of state parks that gave pleasure to countless millions and became models for parks in many other states — and built roads that enabled city-dwellers to get to those parks — but could only do so through an astonishingly complex set of legal and political and administrative maneuvers to appropriate the relevant land from the mega-rich who were hoarding it, from feckless and clueless local administrators who had no clue what to do with it, and, yes, from farmers who made a living from it. Would you wish those parks unmade, and the land still held by plutocrats, or turned into subdivisions?  The question has to be asked because no one other than Moses would have or could have achieved what Moses achieved. No one else had the necessary combination of skills, coupled with endless energy and determination. 

Some of the best passages in The Power Broker capture both sides of the story at once. For instance: 

During the 1930’s, Robert Moses reshaped the face of the greatest city in the New World. He gouged great gashes across it, gashes that once had contained houses by the hundreds and apartment houses by the score. He laid great swaths of concrete across it. He made it grayer, not only with his highways but with parking fields, like the one on Randall’s Island that held 4,000 cars, the one at Orchard Beach that held 8,000 and the one at Jacob Riis Park that held 9,000, that together covered with asphalt a full square mile of the 319 in the city. And he made it greener, planting within its borders two and a half million trees, shrubs and vines, bringing a million others back to bloom, reseeding lawns whose area totaled four square miles and creating a full square mile more of new ones. He filled in its marshes and made them parks. He yanked railroad trestles off its avenues, clearing an even dozen from Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue alone as part of a grade-crossing elimination program he considered so minor that he seldom mentioned it. 

And: 

Part of Moses’ Long Island formula — the vision and the viciousness, the imagination and the ruthlessness, the drive, the urgent, savage thrust, the instinct for the magnificent and the jugular that overrode purely selfish opposition, shortsightedness and red tape to turn vision into reality — was needed in the city, needed desperately, for without it the city would never be able to build parks and roads and bridges — or, for that matter, housing or hospitals, sewers or schools — on the scale its citizens needed. But Moses’ formula could be successful in the city only as the basis of a new, vastly more complicated and subtle and sophisticated formula, one that would turn public works into a far truer reflection of the subtle and complicated human needs they had to serve in the city. A whole new input — a factor of humanity — would have to be added. And Moses would not allow it to be added.

Caro constantly keeps these two visions before our eyes. 

The method that Caro develops in The Power Broker is continued and improved — I am tempted to say perfected — in his biography of LBJ. To take but one example: Many readers have been moved by Caro’s admiring and heartwarming portrait of Coke Stevenson, the immensely popular governor of Texas who lost to LBJ in a Senate race in 1948 – or rather, had the election stolen from him by LBJ. There is absolutely no doubt at this point (partly because of Caro’s deep research) that the election was indeed stolen, and that a nasty, dishonest, manipulative, and power-hungry man stole it from an honest and upright public servant. But Caro portrays the character contrast between the two men so in such contrastive terms because he wants us to understand that if Coke Stevenson — who was an honorable man, but also was a garden-variety Southern racist — had won that campaign it almost certainly would have meant the end of LBJ’s political career, which in turn would have meant that the civil-rights legislation that helped to overcome centuries of structurally-embedded racism in this country would not have happened — or would have been delayed perhaps for decades. (It was precisely because powerful Southern Senators profoundly committed to segregation recognized LBJ as one of them that he was able to bring them around to supporting, or at least accepting, massive changes in the segregationist system.) 

Both Moses and LBJ were nasty men who did terrible things — but also did great things. And there was no way to get the great things without the terrible things coming along for the ride. Do you accept the deal? That’s the question Caro presses on all his readers, and that’s the key to his greatness as a biographer and historian. 

P.S. Denunciation of Robert Moses has often been accompanied by reverence for Jane Jacobs (no relation), but in this outstanding essay Philip Lopate shows why those paired assessments need to be complicated. 

Orange Man v Harvard (2024)

The Promise of American Higher Education – Harvard University President:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. 

I certainly hope that Harvard and any other universities that take the same path of resistance win … but: The question is not whether private universities can determine their own identities, but rather whether private universities can determine their own identities while receiving government funds. If Harvard didn’t take federal funding, the Trump administration would have no leverage over it. (Except possibly the threat to end its tax exemptions, which would be unlikely to survive in court.)  

Without federal funding, of course, even Harvard would struggle to afford certain vital scientific and medical research, which is why I hope they win. But I also hope that they’re serious when they say that they plan to “broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community.” I very much doubt it, though. 

(Take my views on that with a grain of salt, though: as I’ve often said, no matter how much I publish or where I publish it, I am, as a vocal Christian and disposition ally if not programmatically conservative, absolutely unemployable outside the Christian college/university world. So I have a beef.) 

The letter from Harvard’s counsel makes two main arguments, both of which will probably be adjudicated in court: that Harvard has already been making the changes to its institutional culture that the Executive Branch is demanding — which is interesting as an acknowledgment that changes need to be implemented — and that the government cannot cut funding without due process. We’ll see whether the courts endorse or reject those claims. I’ll be watching closely. 

UPDATE: I like this from the WSJ editorial board: 

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing by demanding Harvard accede to “viewpoint diversity.”

The Administration is also overstepping its authority by imposing sweeping conditions on funds that weren’t spelled out by Congress. The Justices held in Cummings (2022) that “if Congress intends to impose a condition on the grant of federal moneys, it must do so unambiguously” to ensure the recipient “voluntarily and knowingly accept[ed] the terms.”

Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose. President Trump has enough balls in the air without also trying to run Harvard. 

And this: 

The demands were designed to blow up negotiations, not move the two parties closer to a deal, said Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of the Harvard Medical School and member of the Council on Academic Freedom, which has been working toward expanding viewpoint diversity on campus.

“You can’t suddenly turn a switch and things change overnight,” he said. Many in the Trump administration “have said that they don’t think the institutions can be reformed from within, and they need to be burned down and rebuilt from the edges.” 

This sounds right — but what does “burned down” mean? Presumably not closed; I guess it means a complete organizational restructuring, with all-new top administrators and a replacement for the Harvard Corporation. Presumably also this new leadership would restructure the academic programs of the university. But perhaps no one in the Trump administration is thinking that far ahead. This may be not a plan but rather just another example of what Steve Bannon calls “flooding rhetoric zone with shit.” 

If anyone associated with the administration does have a plan, though, it would definitely be Christopher Rufo. 

The Promise of American Higher Education – Harvard Univer...

The Promise of American Higher Education – Harvard University President:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. 

I certainly hope that Harvard and any other universities that take the same path of resistance win … but: The question is not whether private universities can determine their own identities but whether private universities can determine their own identities while receiving government funds. If Harvard didn’t take federal funding, it wouldn’t be in this mess. 

Without federal funding, of course, even Harvard would struggle to afford certain vital scientific and medical research, which is why I hope they win. But I also hope that they’re serious when they say that they plan to “broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community.” I very much doubt it, though. 

(Take my views on this with a grain of salt, though: as I’ve often said, no matter how much I publish or where I publish it, I am, as a vocal Christian and someone of a conservative disposition, absolutely unemployable outside the Christian college/university world. So I have a beef.) 

The letter from Harvard’s counsel makes two main arguments, both of which will probably be adjudicated in court: that Harvard has already been making the changes to its institutional culture that the Executive Branch is demanding — which is interesting in that it acknowledges that changes needed to be implemented — and that the government cannot cut funding without due process. We’ll see whether the courts endorse or reject those claims. I’ll be watching closely. 

on humanism: the big picture

The word “humanist” has several meanings, but they tend to fall within two broad camps. (There are other, more specialized, meanings, but we won’t deal with them here.)

The first holds that “man is the measure of all things,” and that there is no God, or at least no God to whom we owe worship and obedience. This is the sort of thing preachers denounce when they speak of “secular humanism.”

The second sees humanism as a project – moral, intellectual, artistic – to restore, improve, and perhaps even perfect the human species. To usher us into our true and noble inheritance.

The first camp is not compatible with Christianity, but I would argue that the second camp pursues a project of which Christianity is the proper fulfillment. Christianity is the true humanism because Jesus Christ as man is what humanity ought to be, and by his death and resurrection he makes it possible for that “ought” to become “is.” Augustine: “As God, he is the goal; as man, he is the way“ (City of God XI.2).

The decline of Christianity in the West and its replacement as a key motive agent of society by liberalism entailed the exchange of a thick description of the human for an exceptionally thin one. Under liberalism, the human becomes the one who chooses its own way, and the role of society, including the political realm, becomes the facilitation of each human’s choice. This account is thin because it’s so simple, but the simplicity has certain virtues: in the light of liberalism’s one principle it becomes obvious, to many anyway, that the racist and sexist structures of the traditional social order are unjust and must be abandoned or at least seriously reformed. And this has been done, albeit inconsistently and imperfectly.

But as the thinness of liberalism’s anthropology – what Charles Taylor called the “Is That All There Is?” problem (A Secular Age, Chapter 8) – became more evident, alternatives with a thicker (if often also a coarser) account of human life began to emerge. And most of these are antiliberal and therefore antihumanist – because, remember, liberalism is a humanism, if an inadequate one. The various illiberalisms, on the Right and on the Left alike, have no room for the concept of the human.

Pause for what I hope will be a useful analogy: Back when I was devoting a good bit of my energy to cultivating ecumenical endeavors among small-o orthodox Christians, I discovered that there are some Roman Catholics for whom “non-catholic Christian” is a functional concept and some for whom it definitely is not, for whom the distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic is the only one that matters. The former might be willing to pursue ecumenical endeavors; the latter would not see the point. If I had pressed any people in that second group, they probably would have acknowledged that there are non-catholic Christians, but the fact was not relevant to them. It did not function as a concept in their ordering of the world. It cut no ice.

Something similar may be said of the illiberalisms of the Left and Right: they would probably acknowledge the existence of the category of the human, but not its relevance. They order the world by three categories: Us, Allies, and Enemies – that last being populated largely by the Repugnant Cultural Other. Thus in the assaults on liberalism humanism is also eviscerated.

In addition to those of the Right and the Left, there is one other antihumanism at work in the modern era, and that is the antihumanism of Capital: the reduction of men and women to machine, parts, instruments of commerce, either as Tools or as Targets. The great critic of Capital is usually thought to be Marx, but Marx’s response to the rise of a thoroughly dehumanizing industrial capitalism with an equally antihumanist account of the world has divided — so he and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto — between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. There’s no room in this analysis for the human. No, the great humanist critic of Capital is John Ruskin, who in The Stones of Venice and elsewhere denounced Taylorism before Frederick Winslow Taylor was even a gleam in his father’s eye.

Whether the antihumanism of modern Capital is a covert repudiation of liberalism or its natural and inevitable culmination is a question I don’t feel obliged to answer here.

But in any case, as the various illiberalisms and antihumanisms have risen and risen in power, we’ve seen various attempts to restrain and subdue those forces. Three such attempts are:

The reassertion of the liberal version of humanism as a secular alternative to the various illiberalisms and Christianity alike, all of which are seen as “extremist” and “intolerant.” (See Karl Popper, and, quite recently, Alexandre Lefebvre.)The assertion of the vague colorless construct of “Judeo-Christian values” as the protector and guarantor of liberalism – liberalism’s Daddy, as it were.The assertion of a robustly Christian anthropology as the only viable alternative to all antihumanisms. (This movement, in the intellectual realm as opposed to the populist realm in which Billy Graham and the larger evangelical movement largely operated, is the subject of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 .)

As the “humanism” tag on this blog suggests, I have thought quite a lot about these matters, and the one Great Conundrum for me continues to be this: Is the renewal of humanism a prerequisite for the renewal of Christianity – or the other way around? That is, does an embrace of humanism make Christianity more plausible, or must one become a Christian – one who believes that all humans are (a) made in the image of God and (b) ”fallen into sin, and become subject to evil and death” (BCP) – before the concept of the human becomes a living and vibrant one?

Beats me.

What I do feel sure of, though, is this: While there are great predecessors to the rearticulation of the human, like Ruskin, vast cultural energies were devoted to resisting antihumanism only in the middle third of the 20th century – basically the period from Lang’s Metropolis to Kubrick’s 2001. (I use cinema to establish those boundaries because cinema is the essential art form of this period, and the one most consistently occupied, if often in a subterranean sort of way, with “the question of humanism.” Even Cat People concerns the human and the nonhuman Other. But you could tell a similar story via any of the other arts. I could describe this as the period between Brave New World and Philip K. Dick, or between early-career George Orwell and early-career Joan Didion, or between Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Revolver.)

In the latter third of the 20th century, several forces combined to suppress the influence of humanism, and since then the antihumanists have been largely triumphant. But that is why I devote my attention to the artists and intellectuals of the mid–20th century: They were the last generations to really fight back. I’m speaking generally, of course: we have humanist artists today, though not so many that you’d notice. Today, most people in the West and in other parts of the world as well have won the victory over themselves: They love their antihuman Big Brothers. So on this blog and elsewhere I will keep turning to those figures of the middle of the previous century for lessons in resistance, lessons in courage, lessons in hope.

a brief thought on passengers and drivers

Here is Ivan Illich, from Energy and Equity (1974), his book written in the midst of a global energy crisis that heightened everyone’s sense of our dependence on fossil fuels for transportation:  

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.

The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To “gather” for him means to be brought together by vehicles…. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. 

It’s interesting to reflect that you could replace just a few words here and have a good description of our current moment. For instance, “To ‘gather’ for him means to be brought together by vehicles” would make perfect sense today if you substituted “devices” for “vehicles.” In “He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role,” the term “passenger” could be replaced by “user.” A technological regime centered on the automobile has been replaced by one centered on smartphones. This is why teenagers today absolutely must have smartphones but are often indifferent to the possibility of learning to drive. 

But for Matthew Crawford in Why We Drive (2020), to drive an automobile is to assert one’s freedom and responsibility. Crawford’s vision is compelling to many of us in a way it would not have been to Illich, and that is because we live in the Smartphone Era. For those of us who live under technocracy, to contemplate the previously dominant technology always feels like sniffing the air of freedom. 

standards

From a while back, Charlie Warzel: 

There is a palpable anger and skepticism toward corporate media, and many have turned to smaller publications or individual creators whom they feel they can trust, even if these groups are not bound to the rigor and standards of traditional outlets. 

I think Warzel’s framing of the issue is telling. Anyone skeptical of contemporary American journalism would instantly flag the phrase “the rigor and standards of traditional outlets”: “Hey Charlie, I think you mean ‘the rigor and standards that traditional outlets claim to uphold but in fact do not.’” 

Similarly, later in the piece, a conversation with the journalist Judith Angwin, Warzel addresses Angwin thus: 

You write that “journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust directly in their interactions with audiences.” I’ve been thinking recently about how many of the processes that traditional media has used to build trust now read as less authentic or less trustworthy to audiences. Having editorial bureaucracy and lawyers and lots of editing to make work more concise and polished actually makes people more suspicious. They feel like we’re hiding something when we aren’t. 

But aren’t you? For instance, was there not a concerted effort on the part of many MSM outlets to hide the diminishment of Joe Biden, a diminishment painfully and relentlessly documented in this long WSJ piece? 

Any real self-reckoning by American journalists should begin with the recognition that they do have “rigor and standards” but apply them in wildly inconsistent ways, depending on whether the reporting at issue flatters or challenges the beliefs of the assumed audience and of the newsroom itself. 

And this is true of all of us, isn’t it? Which is why a blog post from eleven years ago still repays our attention: Scott Alexander’s “Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor.” 

forgiveness

Pale Flower (1964) is an extraordinary film — and, among other things, a masterclass in directorial tact: Shinoda knows precisely when his camera should move and when it should be still. The shape of every shot — and of every sound, for the sound design here is exceptional — is determined by the needs of the story and characters. I can’t imagine a movie from which you could learn more about how to direct a movie. 

How to describe it? Let’s call it a Yakuza existentialist noir. But the fundamental idea of the story (it’s more than a metaphor) is that of gambling: the playing of games, games with high stakes, games whose demands give you a feeling of being alive. One of those games is murder, by the way. Others are played with hanafuda cards — you see one of those above — and we encounter several such games in the course of the film. I haven’t counted, but I suspect they take up a quarter or more of its running time. 

In the scene above our two protagonists are discussing their addiction to wrongdoing. Each of them confesses to the other. Muraki (the Yakuza hitman) does most of the talking here, and concludes his story of how he killed a man and went to prison for it by saying, “Ask anyone: I’m no good. Even I think so. I’m the scum of the earth. I have nothing in common with ordinary society. But still — I forgive myself.” To which Saeko replies: “I know. No matter what others say, I forgive myself too.” 

And I find myself wondering: What, in their cultural context, does that mean? What is the Japanese word they’re using? What history does it have? What to these characters is forgiveness? Is it identical to, similar to, or wholly different from, the Christian meaning of the word? (It’s very curious that when Muraki and Saeko meet she picks him up — in her expensive sports car — in front of a church. But maybe that means nothing.) Their use of the word brought me up short. 

In his endlessly interesting book Studies in Words, C. S. Lewis talks about how the experienced reader learns to cultivate and to heed “semantic discomfort” — discomfort of the kind I am experiencing. But he also points out that often we don’t experience such discomfort when we ought to. The meaning of a word in its context seems so obvious to us that we glide right past it … and over the falls onto the rocks of Error. So when my mind stumbles on a word as it did at this moment in Pale Flower, my next question for myself always is: How many other important and (to the Western viewer) difficult words in this movie did my mind not stumble on? And I have no way to answer that question. Ignorance is always lamentable but only sometimes remediable. 

Fortunately, there’s such a thing as human life: we recognize in other cultures, and even in the most alien of cultures, experiences that remind us of ourselves and people who essentially are ourselves. Some version of the malady that afflicts Muraki and Seiko is known always and everywhere. But I wish I knew more about the differences, subtle and not so subtle, that shape the distinctively Japanese character of those universal themes.